So as noted earlier, I’ve got several servings of my Japanese Curry, and each time I make it I reheat it I try tweaking it with another ingreedient. Today was red wine.
To do this I heated up about 1/4 cup of red wine (Rosemont Estate Shiraz if you’re curious), let it boil for about 10 minutes to get the alcohol out, added a bit more when it reduced more than I expected, and reheated the curry in the same pan, mixing it all together.
The color, obviously, ended up a bit darker. But how did it taste?
This got interesting.
First, I think the taste of the wine amplified the spices. Maybe it was the further cooking, but it was “more” than I’d expect that to do based on past experiences.
It did add a definite richness to the sauce, enough to impress me and make me think. This may be a direction worth exploring.
Clearly a lot of Japanese curries use fruits or fruit juice components. Also wine, like beer (and other alcohols, but mostly I see wine, beer, and sake used) has a very rich, unique taste due to the ingredients and fermentation progress. That fruity taste combined with the richness of a fermented product was interesting – and richness has been what I’ve been seeking in my current stage of my quest for curry.
So I’m very much thinking next experiment I’m going to try a 2-to-one ratio of broth to wine and see how it goes. I think going full-on-wine could really overdo it. Also, obviously, there are many red wines to choose from so I’ll need to pick an appropriate one.
This also makes me wonder what wine-curry pairings could be done in other forms of cooking. Dahl perhaps? Or maybe red wine in one of my baked bean recipes could be delicious as that is spicy.
Very educational and worth trying.
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.